This edition contains the complete text
of the original hardcover edition.
NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.
THE MANSIONS OF LIMBO
A Bantam Book | published in association with Crown Publishers, Inc.
PRINTING HISTORY
Crown edition published 1991
All of the articles in this book were
previously published in Vanity Fair
Bantam edition | July 1992
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1991 by Dominick Dunne.
Cover art copyright © 1992 by Nick Gaetano.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 91-6589.
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v3.1
THE RICH … THE ROYAL … THE RUINED …
In Venice an Australian heiress is about to marry the prince of her dreams when, the night before the wedding, he elopes with the best man.
In Geneva, beneath a red-and-white-striped marquee, princesses, baronesses, and businessmen wildly overbid and overpay for the jewels and love tokens of the late Duchess of Windsor.
In New York City a brilliant and controversial photographer who has taken the sexual experience to the limits in his work enjoys his last showing at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
In a great house in the South of France an alluring countess becomes a mythic figure on the French Riviera … when it is rumored that she’s killed all four of her husbands.
In a quiet garden in Jordan the beautiful, intelligent Queen Noor al Hussein, the American fourth wife of King Hussein, contemplates the precariousness of her throne since the advent of the Gulf War.
THE MANSIONS OF LIMBO
“Awesome … If you missed any of these [in Vanity Fair], or even if you didn’t, buy this book now. Don’t put it off.… This book is a key to America. It has a Renaissance intensity. It shows us the Wheel of Fortune, the Wages of Hubris. It points out the horrid and satisfying truth that the higher you climb, the more inexorably you fall.”
—New York Newsday
“Captures the greed, egomania and personal excesses that ripped away at America’s social fabric during those long 10 years.”
—Buffalo News
“Highly entertaining and razor-sharp.”
—Liz Smith
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
NIGHTMARE ON ELM DRIVE
QUEENS OF THE ROAD
TEARDOWN
HIGH ROLLER: The Phyllis McGuire Story
SOCIAL DEATH IN VENICE
KHASHOGGI’S FALL: A Crash in the Limo Lane
MEMENTO MORI
THE PASSION OF BARON THYSSEN
JANE’S TURN
IT’S A FAMILY AFFAIR
GRANDIOSITY: The Fall of Roberto Polo
DANSE MACABRE: The Rockefeller and the Ballet Boys
THE WINDSOR EPILOGUE
ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE’S PROUD FINALE
THE LIGHT OF HUSSEIN
Dedication
Other Books by This Author
INTRODUCTION
Years ago, reading a book whose title I no longer remember, I came across a sentence in which the words “the mansions of limbo” appeared. I was struck by those words. I loved the sound of them, and they have always stayed with me. In my Catholic youth, I learned that limbo was a blissful repository for the souls of infants who died before they were baptized, a community whose perfection was marred only by the fact that they were denied the sight of God. As I grew older, the meaning of limbo broadened to signify a state of privileged oblivion with a missing ingredient. When I began to put together the pieces from Vanity Fair that make up this collection, I tried to find a unifying factor in the kind of people and situations I write about, and the words that I read so long ago returned to me. However, I could never find the book in which I read them. Neither could scholarly friends or Bartlett’s Quotations reveal their source. So I have simply usurped the words to make up the title of this book.
Not all, but most of the people I write about here soared in the decade of the eighties, a period in which the fortunes of the rich seemed limitless, and our information about them equally limitless. We knew, often with their cooperation, everything there was to know about them: how much money they were worth, how much they paid for their houses, their paintings, their curtains, their dresses, their centerpieces, and their parties. They acquired and acquired, and climbed and climbed. One man earned $550 million in a single year. The cost of another man’s new house reached nearly $100 million. Perhaps it was bliss for them, but, certainly, it was bliss with a missing ingredient. Toward the end, some of the luminous figures went to jail for fiscal irregularities. The marriages of others began to disentangle. And a horrible new disease was killing the innocent in appalling numbers. Then the decade ended.
Has any other decade ever ended so promptly? On the twelfth stroke of midnight on December 31, 1989, it was over, finished, done with, history. The sixties, as they will always be remembered, were reluctant to go. The sixties continued to dance to the music of time until the fourth year of the seventies, before allowing that patient decade to define itself. But people were sick of the eighties, sick of the criminal improprieties of Wall Street, sick of the obeisance to money while the homeless occupied more and more sidewalk space in our cities. People wanted the eighties to be finished. And yet, for as long as it lasted, there was a hilariously horrifying fascination in watching the people who overindulged in extravagance, especially the ones who fell so resoundingly from grace and favor. Twice I went to prisons, one in Lucca, Italy, the other in Bern, Switzerland, to interview financial figures whose life-styles and careers had only recently blazed on the social and financial pages. In Venice an Australian heiress almost married a prince in an international social event, but the heiress was not really an heiress and the prince turned out to be a steward on Qantas Airlines, who eloped with his best man the night before the wedding. In Geneva I watched rich people, mad for instant heritage, stand on chairs and wildly overbid and overpay for the late Duchess of Windsor’s jewels at an auction staged by Sotheby’s in a circus atmosphere worthy of P. T. Barnum. Once I was the lone American on a sailing ship of English aristocrats and minor royals on a cruise through several tropical islands in the Caribbean, a nobleman’s odyssey culminating in a bizarre costume ball on the sands of an island mansion where grand ladies wore tiaras and men adorned themselves with plumes, pearls, and white satin. On Lake Lugano, the beauty queen fifth wife of the man with the second largest art collection in the world, after that of the Queen of England, brought about the transfer of her husband’s famed artworks from Switzerland to her native Spain in hopes of obtaining the title of duchess from the Spanish king. In New York, a great photographer, who recorded with acute precision the dark side of the netherworld as it has never been recorded before, took my picture only a short time before he died. In a Beverly Hills mansion, a film mogul and his wife were brutally slain gangland style, and, seven months later, the
ir two handsome and privileged sons were arrested for the crime, after a massive spending spree with their new inheritance.
All the pieces do not fit into the pattern of the late decade. There are the eternal figures like the singer Phyllis McGuire, once the mistress of the gangster Sam Giancana, in her Las Vegas mansion, and the actress Jane Wyman, the only divorced wife of a United States president, who have defied time and continue to fascinate. There is Lady Kenmare, the chatelaine of a great house in the South of France, who flourished in international society in the thirties, forties, and fifties as the rumored murderess of her four husbands. And, finally, there is the beautiful and highly intelligent Queen Noor of Jordan, the American fourth wife of King Hussein, who sits on a precarious throne between Israel and Iraq during the war that will define the new decade.
Dominick Dunne
New York, 1991
NIGHTMARE ON ELM DRIVE
On a recent New York-to-Los Angeles trip on MGM Grand Air, that most luxurious of all coast-to-coast flights, I was chilled to the bone marrow during a brief encounter with a fellow passenger, a boy of perhaps fourteen, or fifteen, or maybe even sixteen, who lounged restlessly in a sprawled-out fashion, arms and legs akimbo, avidly reading racing-car magazines, chewing gum, and beating time to the music on his Walkman. Although I rarely engage in conversations with strangers on airplanes, I always have a certain curiosity to know who everyone is on MGM Grand Air, which I imagine is a bit like the Orient Express in its heyday. The young traveler in the swivel chair was returning to California after a sojourn in Europe. There were signals of affluence in his chat; the Concorde was mentioned. His carry-on luggage was expensive, filled with audiotapes, playing cards, and more magazines. During the meal, we talked. A week before, two rich and privileged young men named Lyle and Erik Menendez had been arrested for the brutal slaying of their parents in the family’s $5 million mansion on Elm Drive, a sedate tree-lined street that is considered one of the most prestigious addresses in Beverly Hills. The tale in all its gory grimness was the cover story that week in People magazine, many copies of which were being read on the plane.
“Do you live in Beverly Hills?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Where?”
He told me the name of his street, which was every bit as prestigious as Elm Drive. I once lived in Beverly Hills and knew the terrain well. His home was in the same general area as the house where Kitty and Jose Menendez had been gunned down several months earlier in a fusillade of fourteen twelve-gauge shotgun blasts—five to the head and body of the father, nine to the face and body of the mother—that left them virtually unrecognizable as human beings, according to eyewitness reports. The slaying was so violent that it was assumed at first to have been of Mafia origins—a hit, or Mob rubout, as it was called, even in the Wall Street Journal. The arrest of the two handsome, athletic Menendez sons after so many months of investigation had shocked an unshockable community.
“Did you ever know the Menendez brothers?” I asked the teenager.
“No,” he replied. They had gone to different schools. They were older. Lyle was twenty-two, Erik nineteen. In that age group, a few years makes an enormous difference.
“A terrible thing,” I said.
“Yeah,” he replied. “But I heard the father was pretty rough on those kids.”
With that, our conversation was concluded.
Patricide is not an altogether new crime in the second echelon of Southland society. Nor is matricide. On March 24, 1983, twenty-year-old Michael Miller, the son of President Ronald Reagan’s personal lawyer, Roy Miller, raped and clubbed to death his mother, Marguerite. In a minimally publicized trial, from which the media was barred, Miller was found guilty of first-degree murder but was acquitted of the rape charge, presumably on the technicality that the rape had occurred after his mother was dead. The judge then ruled that young Miller, who had been diagnosed as schizophrenic, was legally innocent of murder by reason of insanity. “Hallelujah,” muttered Michael Miller after the verdict. He was sent to Patton State Hospital, a mental institution in California.
On July 22, 1983, in a Sunset Boulevard mansion in Bel-Air, twenty-year-old Ricky Kyle shot his father, millionaire Henry Harrison Kyle, the president of Four Star International, a television-and-movie-production firm, in the back after awakening him in the middle of the night to tell him there was a prowler in the house. Several witnesses testified that Ricky had confided in them about a longstanding desire to kill his father, who was alleged to have been physically and mentally abusive to his son. The prosecution argued that Ricky was consumed with hatred for his father and greed for his fortune, and that, fearing that he was about to be disinherited, he plotted the ruse of the prowler. With the extraordinary leniency of the Southern California courts for first-time murderers, young Kyle was sentenced to five years for the slaying. Expressing dismay with the verdict, Ricky’s mother told reporters she had hoped her son would be spared a prison term. “I think he has suffered enough,” she said. Ricky agreed. “I feel like I don’t deserve to go to prison,” he said.
And then there were the Woodman brothers, Stewart and Neil, accused of hiring two assassins to gun down their rich parents in Brentwood. Tried separately, Stewart was convicted of first-degree murder. To escape the death penalty, he incriminated his brother. Neil’s trial is about to start.
Further elaboration is not necessary: the point has been made. One other case, however, on a lesser social stratum but of equal importance, under the circumstances, should be mentioned: the Salvatierra murder, which received international attention. In 1986, Oscar Salvatierra, the Los Angeles—based executive of a newspaper called Philippine News, was shot while he was asleep in bed, after having received a death threat that was at first believed to be tied to the newspaper’s opposition to former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos. Later, Arnel Salvatierra, his seventeen-year-old son, admitted sending the letter and killing his father. In court, Arnel Salvatierra’s lawyer convinced the jury that Arnel was the victim of a lifetime of physical and psychological abuse by his father. The lawyer, Leslie Abramson, who is considered to be the most brilliant Los Angeles defense lawyer for death-row cases, compared Arnel Salvatierra to the tragic Lisa Steinberg of New York, whose father, Joel Steinberg, had been convicted of murdering her after relentlessly abusing her. “What happens if the Lisa Steinbergs don’t die?” Abramson asked the jury. “What happens if they get older, and if the cumulative effect of all these years of abuse finally drives them over the edge, and Lisa Steinberg pulls out a gun and kills Joel Steinberg?” Arnel Salvatierra, who had been charged with first-degree murder, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and placed on probation.
This story is relevant to the Menendez case in that the same Leslie Abramson is one-half the team defending the affluent Menendez brothers. Her client is Erik Menendez, the younger brother. Gerald Chaleff, with whom she frequently teams, is representing Lyle. On an earlier burglary case involving the brothers, Chaleff, who gained prominence in criminal law as the defender of the Hillside Strangler, represented Erik. It is rumored that Abramson and Chaleff are each being paid $700,000. Psychological abuse is a constant theme in articles written about the brothers, and will probably be the basis of the defense strategy when the case comes to trial. There are even whispers—shocker of shockers—of sexual abuse in the Menendez family.
Jose Enrique Menendez was an American success story. A Cuban émigré, he was sent to the United States by his parents in 1960 at age fifteen to escape from Castro’s Cuba. His father, a onetime soccer star, and his mother, a former champion swimmer, stayed behind until their last properties were seized by Castro. Young Jose, who excelled in swimming, basketball, and soccer, won a swimming scholarship to Southern Illinois University, but he gave it up when he married Mary Louise Andersen, known as Kitty, at the age of nineteen and moved to New York. He earned a degree in accounting at Queens College in Flushing, New York, while working part-time as a dishwasher at the swan
k “21” Club in Manhattan, where, later, successful and prosperous, he would often dine. Then began a career of astonishing ascendancy which took him through Hertz, where he was in charge of car and commercial leasing, to the record division of RCA, where he signed such high-earning acts as Menudo, the Eurythmics, and Duran Duran. By this time he and Kitty had had two sons and settled down to a graceful life on a million-dollar estate in Princeton, New Jersey. The boys attended the exclusive Princeton Day School and, urged on by their father, began developing into first-rate tennis and soccer players. Their mother attended every match and game they played. When Jose clashed with a senior executive at RCA in 1986, after having been passed over for the executive vice presidency of RCA Records, he uprooted his family, much to the distress of Kitty, who loved her life and house in Princeton, and moved to Los Angeles. There he leapfrogged to I.V.E., International Video Entertainment, a video distributor which eventually became Live Entertainment, a division of the hugely successful Carolco Pictures, the company that produced the Rambo films of Sylvester Stallone as well as some of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s action films. Jose Menendez’s success at Live Entertainment was dazzling. In 1986 the company lost $20 million; a year later, under Menendez, Live earned $8 million and in 1988 doubled that. “He was the perfect corporate executive,” I was told by one of his lieutenants. “He had an incredible dedication to business. He was focused, specific about what he wanted from the business, very much in control. He believed that whatever had to be done should be done—with no heart, if necessary.”
The family lived at first in Calabasas, an upper-middle-class suburb of Los Angeles, inland beyond Malibu, where they occupied one house while building a more spectacular one on thirteen acres with mountaintop views. Then, unexpectedly, almost overnight, the family abandoned Calabasas and moved to Beverly Hills, where Jose bought the house on Elm Drive, a six-bedroom Mediterranean-style house with a red tile roof, a courtyard, a swimming pool, a tennis court, and a guesthouse. Built in 1927, rebuilt in 1974, the house had good credentials. It had previously been rented to Elton John. And Prince. And Hal Prince. And a Saudi prince, for $35,000 a month. Erik Menendez, the younger son, transferred from Calabasas High to Beverly Hills High, probably the most snobbish public school in America. Lyle was a student at Princeton University, fulfilling one of the many American dreams of his immigrant father.
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